'IF I GO BACK TO DOING DOPE, I KNOW I'M GOING TO DIE'

When asked where she grew up, Juniper Abbott doesn't name a city or a
neighbourhood.

She says this: "On the street. In abandoned buildings. Pretty much
everything I learned, I learned on the street - affection, friendship,
love, happiness, safety."

The 34-year-old has been at the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and
Addiction for nine months. When she arrived, her life was falling apart.

"I was on the street all the time, panhandling, begging for money, out
in the cold, getting soaked, getting sick, getting pneumonia," she
recalled in an interview. "Just being cold and saying, 'Just one more
hit, one more hit.' It was never just one more."

The only thought she entertained about her future was her
death.

"I think almost every drug addict, in the back of their head, always
has that option of overdosing . . . and that's not a good thing," said
Abbott.

Born into a bad situation, it has fallen on the shoulders of a clean
and adult Abbott to relearn how to live, how to deal with the
depression that keeps her in bed some days and how to douse the flames
of anger that take over other days.

She is also being treated for post-traumatic stress
syndrome.

"I never even knew I had that until I came here," she says of the
anxiety disorder. "It took me a long time to even realize that the way
I grew up and the way I was treated was wrong."

"Pretty bad" is how she now sees her early life. Her parents divorced
when she was two, she was sexually abused as a child by a family
member, her mom killed herself when Abbott was 10 and she was sent to
live with the dad she didn't know.

"My stepmother was really cruel to me. She was so cruel to me that I
couldn't look people in the eye until I was 20 years old," she said.

Abbott waited three months to get into the Burnaby treatment centre
after staff at OnSite, the detox centre above the supervised injection
facility Insite, helped her fill out the application.

"If it wasn't for going to Insite and being around the people, being
around the idea of detox and being able to talk to people when you are
really strung out . . . I would not be here in the Burnaby centre,"
she said. "It gave me hope."

It took four months of "slipping and relapsing" until she got through
her first clean month.

She's upgrading her high-school education. She goes to the library.
She attends group-therapy sessions. It's been "a real eyeopener."

"Although I had no control over the things that have happened to me, I
have control over what my future is going to be," said Abbott. "If I
go back to doing dope, I know I'm going to die."